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Back in 2010, Aleksandr Yufa filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Rees Scientific claiming infringement of his portfolio of particle-measuring patents. He lost in U.S. District Court, and just lost his appeal. Worse yet, the Federal Circuit appointed a receiver to take title to Mr. Yufa’s patents to sell them to pay $166,365 in attorney’s fees charged to Mr. Yufa by the court for filing a “baseless” patent lawsuit.

It’s always the drummer who gets the girl. In this case, the issue is with the guitarist. It seems that the founder of a band known as “Boston,” one Tom Scholz, sued a former guitarist for the band, one Barry Goudreau, for trademark infringement. Goudreau left Boston and formed a new group called “Ernie and the Automatics.”

The plaintiff in this case gets no sympathy from the writer of this blog because I drink my coffee as the good Lord intended: Black. No milk, no cream, no Half & Half, no sugar, no sweetener, no nothin’. Straight from the coffee pot. I even drink iced coffee that way. Yeah!

World Chess Events, and its subsidiary, World Chess U.S., own the commercial rights to this year’s World Chess Championship. In a bold move (Sorry. It was too easy.), World Chess has filed a lawsuit against two chess websites, claiming that they “pirated” chess plays that are the intellectual property of World Chess Events and World Chess U.S. World Chess & Company is seeking $4.5 million in damages and asking the U.S. District Court hearing the case to block both websites from publishing chess plays from an upcoming championship match.

We are reminded of the line in Carol King’s Sweet Seasons: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes the blues just get a hold of you.” Selee, a manufacturer of foam-based filtration equipment, sued McDanel Advanced Ceramics Technology, a manufacturer of ceramic tubes and components, for infringement of its “Engineered Ceramics” trademark. We can only assume that the plaintiff or its lawyers just made a bad impression on the jury, because the jury found that McDanel had indeed infringed Selee’s trademark, but it awarded Selee $1. Ouch!

Taking on a trademark involves more than just filing a form with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and hoping to receive back a favorable response. Most companies buy a website domain to match their hoped-for trademark, and they mark up all of their products and services with the hoped-for trademark to start building the brand.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche made the controversial statement back in 1882 that "God is dead." Pure Flix Entertainment took a totally different approach with its 2014 independent film, “God’s Not Dead.” Based on the success of the film: Nietzsche 0, God 1.

A Michael Brown of Okland, California, is in hot water. While we admire his entrepreneurship, we cannot understand what he does not understand about trademarks. Mr. Brown set up two businesses, “New York Jedi” and “Lightsaber Academy,” to provide training for use of the fictional weapons made part of the culture by the Star Wars movies.

Lucasfilm, the company founded by George Lucas, the creator and owner of the Star Wars franchise (and now a unit of Disney), is suing Mr. Brown for trademark infringement.

Many things can be copyrighted - from novels, poems and plays, to songs, music and performance. But fonts can – and very often are - copyrighted. By “font” we mean the design of a typeface.

And just to prove that, Font Brothers (yes, that is the name of the company) is suing Hasbro, the toy giant, for copyright infringement over its use of its Generation B font for Hasbro’s My Little Pony products. In the Complaint, the plaintiff claims that Hasbro failed to secure a license to use Generation B so it is using a “pirated font.”

A U.S. District Court judge tossed out a trademark lawsuit against international fashion house Louis Vuitton claiming that it copied the design of LVL XII, a small, luxury sneaker designer and manufacturer. It all came down to a strip of metal that both companies attach to the front of the sole of their sneakers that are called “toe places.”

The case never even went to a jury. The judge ruled that there was no infringement and dismissed the case. Here are the two sneakers.